THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

A subgenre of fiction appeared in the eighteenth century, preponderantly in English, now known variously as 'it-narratives', 'object tales', and 'novels of circulation'. They were autobiographies of things and creatures--dogs, coins, and articles of dress were popular--and they exploited two of the century's dominant preoccupations, one with the ancient doctrine of metempsychosis and the other with the modern theory of sympathy. They imitated Ovid and cited his Pythagorean beliefs to show how metamorphoses between the human and nonhuman occur when confusion amidst the world of objects destabilizes personal identity or when personal identity contrives to extend itself beyond the limit of species. Sympathy was the measure of the 'kindness' of these changes, the degree to which the feelings of different creatures might be communicated and shared. It was monitored by sentimental novels, whose authors and readers shared a belief in the benevolent tendency of a sensus communis, and were not shy of including animals and artifacts within it. But some of these it-narratives are surprisingly unkind to the extent that they show sympathy to be a perverse outcome of a defensive or hostile relation between species and things. In these stories metamorphosis reveals one mode of being at odds with another; and sometimes when they find their voices, things and creatures use them not to admire and claim association with human beings, but to report matters that humiliate and disgrace them, such as their avarice, delusion, cruelty, ugliness, and mortality. Alternatively, humans may be propelled towards another kind not for sentimental pleasure but as a refuge from loneliness or self-loathing. Sometimes it is terror or hatred that supplies the energy for a change of shape. The genealogy and descent of these intimate but troubled connections between the human and the nonhuman extend from the early modern period to the present day. By tracing the line backwards, I hope to show more clearly how this form of narrative conflict developed in the eighteenth century.

See Also Bill Brown: How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story) (Summer 1998) Amy Robinson: It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest (Summer 1994) Hal Foster: 'Primitive' (Autumn 1993) David Marshall: Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments (Summer 1984)

I begin with two pieces of fiction by an author peculiarly alert to this legacy; and then in the terms he has handled it, I shall rehearse some of the key moments in the history of its formation. In The Lives of Animals and Disgrace, both published in 1999, J. M. Coetzee probes the limits of sympathy.1 In the first he adapted two Tanner lectures he had given at Princeton University for a philosophical dialogue upon the rights of animals. The dialogue is managed by an older woman, Elizabeth Costello, whose fear of death is correlated to her indignation at the injustices humans inflict on animals. The second is a novel about the shaming and exile of a man who learns how to mitigate his isolation by working in an animal refuge, where with quixotic punctilio he attends the death of unwanted dogs, easing the disgrace of their end with certain pointless formalities. In his review of these two books, Ian Hacking wrote of the importance of sympathy for Coetzee who, he argued, 'speaks for a felt sympathy between some people and at least some animals.'2 He then drew the moral he understood Coetzee had embedded in these stories: 'We shall have to broaden our sympathies in ways we do not well understand.... So I think we have to be Humean and first worry about how to enlarge our sympathies.'3 It is a good pun, since Hume is not only a defender of the rationality of beasts but stands preeminent as the first British philosopher to investigate the social and psychological subtleties of sympathy. But Coetzee--and Hume, for that matter--join an older debate about the fellowship of animals and humans, or what was known to the Greeks as their oikeiosis. Its advocates were Plutarch, Pythagoras, and Porphyry among the philosophers, and Ovid and Apuleius among the poets.4 For those who believed in the transmigration of souls and the possibility of metamorphosis between species, plants, and substances, there was every reason to extend sympathy to all sentient creatures, and beyond to trees and stones, for all are connected by the possibility of mutual substitution--via death or that passionate transport 'by which we are put in the place of another'.5 As the gateway to metamorphosis among living things is the dissolution of the body and its renewal in a different form, and as this change is frequently accompanied and sometimes even determined by excessive grief or sympathy (in Ovid's stories of Phaeton's sisters, of Procris and of Niobe, for instance), the terms of Coetzee's argument, depending on the correlation between the presence of death and the degree of interspecies sympathy, are generally consistent with Ovid's examples of Pythagorean doctrine. I suggest that this is more than an accidental resemblance and that the three linked elements of sympathy, death, and metamorphosis recur in the history of representation that leads from Ovid's epic to Coetzee's novel, but not (as I have said) in ways that are always flattering to human agency.

1. See J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, 1999); hereafter abbreviated L. See also Coetzee, Disgrace (New York, 1999); hereafter abbreviated D.

2. Ian Hacking, 'Our Fellow Animals', New York Review of Books, 29 June 2000, p. 20.

3. Ibid., p. 26.

4. See Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals (London, 1993).

5. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford, 1987), p. 44.

Jonathan Lamb is a professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of, most recently, Preserving the Self in the South Seas (2001) and coeditor, with Vanessa Smith and Nicholas Thomas, of the anthology Exploration and Exchange (2000).